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You may have an amazing website that offers a lot of useful information and applications, but if you don’t get any visitors to it it’s pretty much all in vain. There are many different ways to get visitors to your site. Most often, this is achieved by free/organic search results or by paid traffic.

So in this post, I will briefly explain the difference between organic and paid traffic, or in other terms, the difference between SEO and PPC traffic will be explained. A lot of information on this subject can be found on the web, and one really needs to stay up to date.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. To be able to rank in organic or free search results, you need to do a proper Search Engine Optimization or SEO. And this is not only dependent on your site but also on the other sites that are linking to your site. A part of the SEO process is to “optimize” your site so it would achieve an optimum ranking in search engines such as Google. It’s important to remember that search engines rank pages rather than websites. For example, if your site has 10 different pages, you can optimize each page to rank for different keywords and in many instances you will be able to rank for multiple keyword. Nice thing about an SEO traffic is that it is a highly targeted traffic.

Let’s see one example that can help you understand this better. We will consider a business from city of Vancouver, the host of 2010 Winter Olympics.

If you need pest control and you live in Vancouver, most likely you will type the following keyword in Google search: Vancouver Pest Control,.

The below image shows a parts of the results returned by Google. The first three are paid search and I will explain that in more details under the PPC section of this article.

The forth result is the first organic result or first “free” result or so to speak first SEO result with a good Vancouver SEO optimization done.

What you need to do on your page is to make sure that the title of your page includes words Vancouver + Pest + Control, and in our example we can see that those three words are present. Next thing you should make sure to have is those words present in Meta Tag Description. Also, very important part of SEO is to have content that is centered around this keyword on your page. Ideally more than 500 words of well-written content. It’s very clear that the page that ranks for this keyword is centered around pest control in Vancouver. In addition, this page even has an image with alt-tag description: pest-control-vancouver-bc-300×193. So this tells us that it is important to have your images optimized around your keywords and that is what Google states in their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

Other component of SEO depends on webpages that are linking to your website. Those links have to come from trusted websites and need to be diversified and this process takes patience. If you want to achieve good SEO of free rankings you may want to consider hiring a reputable Vancouver SEO company. Many companies offer free Search Engine Optimization estimates and reports.

What is PPC?

PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click. So that means any time somebody clicks on your ad in search engines you will be charged a certain amount of money. How much? It really does depend on your competition and how much you’re willing to bid for certain keywords. In the image above, first three results are Paid or PPC results and all other results on the side are also paid ads. These companies being advertised will only be charged once those searching for their services click on their ads. I guess it is clear now where acronym PPC comes from.

In conclusion, what’s better? It really depends on the type of your business. For the best results, it’s ideal to employ both of these so that you can get more traffic and that will result in more visitors and more potential customers for you.